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Byron York has a good article in the Washington Examiner on what it means for the Senate to refer the Steele dossier for criminal investigation by the FBI— basically, that Steele lied to the FBI to get it to investigate imaginary happenings, which is a crime, and the Senators want the Justice Department to file charges under 18 U.S.C. 1001 or explain why not.

I got interested in this and have been scanning the web for legal explanations of this kerfuffle, since I am not a lawyer. There aren’t any good ones. As I said, I’m not a lawyer, but I know a lot of law (I’ve co-authored numerous scholarly articles with law professors from Indiana, Illinois, UCLA, Chicago, Yale,Tokyo, and Harvard and I’m the relator in New York ex rel. Eric Rasmusen v. Citigroup). I think I know more law than Mr. Rosenzweig, even though I feel my limitations keenly in this area of law (try me on tax whistleblower law, agency law, or the tax treatment of net operating losses and I’ll do better). So I’ll post this, to better inform the public. Maybe it will encourage real experts to come forward too. I wrote a book on game theory when I was 30 that had lots of mistakes, but it was the first in its field and I did stimulate, I fancy, older and wiser people to write books to improve on mine.

If I have mistakes, please comment. I see an enormous amount of ignorant and arrogant commenting on these issues on the Internet, though, so please only comment only if you aren’t just mouthing off. I’ll delete the comment otherwise.

VC has a good post on laws against child drinking and communion, with comments on communion in both kinds. The Roman position seems to be that it is like priestly celibacy a policy strictly enforced by the Church but allowed or not depending on circumstances of the age. The Council of Constance decrees condemned this and other Wylclifite ideas as being against church commands, not as heresy in itself.

….although Christ instituted this venerable sacrament after a meal and ministered it to his apostles under the forms of both bread and wine, nevertheless and notwithstanding this, the praiseworthy authority of the sacred canons and the approved custom of the church have and do retain that this sacrament ought not to be celebrated after a meal nor received by the faithful without fasting, except in cases of sickness or some other necessity as permitted by law or by the church. Moreover, just as this custom was sensibly introduced in order to avoid various dangers and scandals, so with similar or even greater reason was it possible to introduce and sensibly observe the custom that, although this sacrament was received by the faithful under both kinds in the early church, nevertheless later it was received under both kinds only by those confecting it, and by the laity only under the form of bread. For it should be very firmly believed, and in no way doubted, that the whole body and blood of Christ are truly contained under both the form of bread and the form of wine. Therefore, since this custom was introduced for good reasons by the church and holy fathers, and has been observed for a very long time, it should be held as a law which nobody may repudiate or alter at will without the church’s permission. To say that the observance of this custom or law is sacrilegious or illicit must be regarded as erroneous. Those who stubbornly assert the opposite of the aforesaid are to be confined as heretics and severely punished by the local bishops or their officials or the inquisitors of heresy in the kingdoms or provinces in which anything is attempted or presumed against this decree, according to the canonical and legitimate sanctions that have been wisely established in favour of the catholic faith against heretics and their supporters.

One aspect of the Clinton scandals was that Clinton fired all the US Attorneys immediately upon coming to office, rather than waiting until he had nominated new people to replace the Bush appointees. This was widely thought to have been to aimed at replacing the Arkansas district attorney who was a threat to him personally, but who couldn’t have been fired as a single case without looking even worse. I just learned something new: the Clinton transition team lied to the Bush Administration about their intentions. Probably that was so the district attorneys couldn’t speed up investigations or take papers away with them. See The Washington Post:

Advisers to Obama say they have learned from past mistakes, including Clinton’s decision to require all U.S. attorneys to submit their resignations.

Critics said that move threw law enforcement efforts into disarray. And Richard Cullen, who was a U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia under President George H.W. Bush, said that crossed signals during the Clinton transition left some prosecutors on the street unexpectedly.

“We just got a call one day: Resign right away,” said Cullen, now chairman of the law firm McGuire Woods. “That was at odds with what the Clinton transition people told the Bush transition people. Some people didn’t have jobs to go back to, and had families to feed.”

Of course, one of the oddities of liberals is how outraged they were when Bush fired a handful of U.S. attorneys later on without giving any reason.

Selective Prosecution. The Taipei Times article “Ma found not guilty in corruption trial” tells of how the KMT government in Taiwan prosecuted opposition party leader Ma for keeping for personal use much of a “special allowance” as mayor of Taipei. It seems that it has been customary for years for officials to treat the allowance as income, and Ma made no secret of doing so, in which case this seems a good example of selective prosecution for political purposes.

I have read people saying that election fraud has trivial importance in the United States, so the Republicans’ desire for investigations and for identity to be verified for voting is unjustified. Here’s clear evidence against that. Note, too, the behavior of US Attorney John McKay, who was later fired.Click here to read more

It was right to fire him for that.

But the most interesting news came out of Seattle, where on Thursday local prosecutors indicted seven workers for Acorn, a union-backed activist group that last year registered more than 540,000 low-income and minority voters nationwide and deployed more than 4,000 get-out-the- vote workers. The Acorn defendants stand accused of submitting phony forms in what Secretary of State Sam Reed says is the "worst case of voter-registration fraud in the history" of the state.

The list of "voters" registered in Washington state included former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Tom Friedman, actress Katie Holmes and nonexistent people with nonsensical names such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy. The addresses used for the fake names were local homeless shelters. Given that the state doesn’t require the showing of any identification before voting, it is entirely possible people could have illegally voted using those names.

Local officials refused to accept the registrations because they had been delivered after last year’s Oct. 7 registration deadline. Initially, Acorn officials demanded the registrations be accepted and threatened to sue King County (Seattle) officials if they were tossed out. But just after four Acorn registration workers were indicted in Kansas City, Mo., on similar charges of fraud, the group reversed its position and said the registrations should be rejected. But by then, local election workers had had a reason to carefully scrutinize the forms and uncovered the fraud. Of the 1,805 names submitted by Acorn, only nine have been confirmed as valid, and another 34 are still being investigated. The rest–over 97%–were fake. …

In Washington state, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said that in lieu of charging Acorn itself as part of the registration fraud case, he had worked out an agreement by which the group will pay $25,000 to reimburse the costs of the investigation and formally agree to tighten supervision of its activities, which Mr. Satterberg said were rife with "lax oversight."…

Take Washington state, where former U.S. attorney John McKay declined to pursue allegations of voter fraud after that state’s hotly contested 2004 governor’s race was decided in favor of Democrat Christine Gregoire by 133 votes on a third recount. As the Seattle media widely reported, some "voters" were deceased, others were registered in storage lockers, and still others were ineligible felons. Extra ballots were "found" and declared valid 10 times during the vote count and recount. In some precincts, more votes were cast than voters showed up at the polls.

Mr. McKay insists he left "no stone unturned" in investigating allegations of fraud in the governor’s race but found no evidence of a crime. But in an interview with Stefan Sharkansky of SoundPolitics.com in May, Mr. McKay admitted that he "didn’t like the way the election was handled" and that it had "smelled really, really bad." His decision not to prosecute was apparently based on the threshold of evidence he insisted be met before he would even deploy FBI agents to investigate: a firsthand account of a conspiracy to alter the outcome of the election.

But Mr. McKay is incorrect in saying that he had to find a conspiracy in order to reach the federal threshold for election crimes. In Milwaukee, after the 2004 election U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic investigated many of the same problems that were found in Seattle: felons voting, double-voting and more votes cast than voters who signed poll books. In 2005 Mr. Biskupic concluded that he had found nothing that "has shown a plot to try to tip an election," but he nonetheless prosecuted and won six convictions for felon voting and double-voting.

Note that the federal law apparently doesn’t make it a crime to use fraud to change the result of an election—it only makes it a crime to use fraud to change the result of an election *because you want your side to win*. If you do it for money, that doesn’t count. Or so the US attorneys interpret the law.